Owners often create or purchase ‘toys’ to keep bored horses occupied. Many horses get bored when they are confined to stalls or smaller paddocks. They might be restricted due to many different reasons, including injury, quarantine, available space, or to reduce feed consumption.
In this article, we look at some simple ways to help your horse not be bored. Boredom can lead to unwanted behaviors. Those might include cribbing, stall walking, weaving, licking and chewing objects, weight gain or loss, or just a ‘grumpy’ attitude.
Environmental Enrichment
Environmental enrichment refers to the practice of altering a ‘captive’ animal’s living environment to improve physical, mental, and social stimulation. The goal is to make better the animal’s overall well-being by allowing it to engage in more natural behaviors. Animal managers also want to reduce animal stress through sensory and cognitive challenges.
Basically, environmental enrichment means providing a more complex and stimulating environment for the animal to live in.
Therefore, when you have a horse that has to be confined, it is good for the horse to have environmental enrichment. Let’s look at a few examples.
Mimic Natural Behaviors with Toys
From zoo animals to horses, behaviorists strive to enrich the animals’ environment through ways that mimic natural behaviors. The most prominent of these is searching for food.
There are multiple commercial horse ‘toys’ that release a small amount of feed/hay pellets or small treats as the horse moves the toy across the ground. This stimulates movement and rewards the inquisitiveness with what the horse likes best—food.
“A common strategy for environmental enrichment is to create opportunities for animals to search and work for food,” noted the authors of one study on horses and ponies used for research.1 “This kind of enrichment should encourage normal foraging behaviors and can be accomplished by distributing multiple hay nets or hay racks in different locations and by providing multiple types of feed. Commercial and custom-made food dispensers can also promote foraging and reduce stereotypic behaviors.”
Those research authors said other strategies for environmental enrichment include “provision of visual stimuli such as outdoor vistas or mirrors and high-resolution photographs, which can satisfy a horse’s natural compulsion to see other animals and visual horizons.”
They stated that there is currently little scientific evidence to indicate which enrichment
methods are most effective for horses.
(Editor’s note: I have found that some adult horses with a high ‘play drive’ do like commercial or owner-made toys. Those horses are easy to identify because often they will take whatever is in their environment—buckets, hay bags, blankets, removed fly masks—and ‘play’ with that object.)
Notes from One Researcher
Katherine Houpt, VMD, PhD, of Cornell University, is a Diplomate American College of Veterinary Behaviorists. She is one of the authors of the aforementioned research. Houpt said, “Of the commercial toys, I found the Likit Tongue Twister (essentially a giant piece of hard candy that the horse must push to gain access) occupies the horse the longest.”
Houpt added that this treat is “probably not good for horses with metabolic syndrome, but is otherwise enriching.”
This product is available from various suppliers in the UK and US and can be found on Amazon.com.
She also said a scratching post or self grooming device is another enrichment tool. “The ones made for goats are suitable for ponies and, probably, most horses,” she noted. “The mechanized cattle ones are very expensive.”
You can find several types of non-mechanized brushes and rubbing pads made for horses online by searching ‘self-grooming device horse‘ and looking through the options.
Make-It-Yourself Stall Toys
A quick and inexpensive horse toy can be made by placing a few rocks, hay cubes or carrot pieces into an enclosed plastic gallon water, juice, or milk jug and hanging it from the rafters. The sturdier the plastic bottle, the longer it will last. An inquisitive horse will play with this. The rocks or treats rolling around inside and the noise they make often keep a horse occupied for a time.
Another way to relieve a horse’s boredom in non-winter months is with a food popsicle. Fill a plastic container with water (or juice). And add fruits (and veggies) cut to an edible size that won’t cause choke. Place the container in the freezer.
Once frozen solid, remove the frozen ‘popsicle’ from the plastic and put it into your horse’s feeder. He’ll spend a bit of time licking and gnawing at it to get at the treats while the ice melts
Final Words
This is far from an exhaustive list of ‘toys’ you can use as environmental enrichment for your horse. Ask your veterinarian, farrier, university horse extension agent, an equine behaviorist, or horse friends if they have an environmental enrichment device that works well for them and their horses.
Resources
- Management methods to improve the welfare of horses used in research. Valerie S. M. Jonckheer-Sheehy, MVB, MRCVS, CertWEL, MSc LAS, Dip. ECAWBM (BM), and Katherine A. Houpt, BS, VMD, PhD, DACVB. 2015. Nature America.
Further Reading
- Proactive Planning for Horse Retirement. MySeniorHorse.com
- Are Stall Toys Good for Horses? Nancy Diehl, VMD. TheHorse.com
- Which Toy Would Your Horse Enjoy? EQUUSmagazine.com
- How to Make a Dry Lot Your Horse Will Love. Hope Ellis-Ashburn. EQUUSmagazine.com
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Kimberly S. Brown is an award-winning writer and publisher. She is the Editorial Director for My Senior Horse. Brown spent 10 years at Equine Network, parent company of My Senior Horse. Prior to that she worked for three years in equine nutrition after she retired from nearly 30 years working at The Blood-Horse. Brown spent the last 15 years of her time at that organization creating and developing The Horse and TheHorse.com.View all posts